Government Documents/Maps

Today I am giving a huge shout out to the most recent addition of Adbusters magazine, for giving me fodder for continued hope that humanity can actually overcome its own self-inflicted demise, unlike those who have promised it [hope] in the past and have so far failed to deliver.

Adbusters has, obviously, for a while been opposed to the universal ad campaign that has come to pollute much of our world since advertising became the modern Bible and consumerism became moral in the post-WWII period.  Well, it turns out that if the Old and New Testaments, and all those documents that are accepted or denied as “Bible,” make up the greatest story ever told, advertising is a giant pornographic picture book whose lessons for humanity tell us more about how to get into debt than how to live a noble or pious life.

I’m not trying to pass judgment here, really.  If you like advertising, in its current repetitive, mind-numbing form, then you’re the last of a dying breed according to Douglas Haddow, (former adman and) contributing freelance writer in the July/Aug ‘09 Adbusters.  Word under the street is that all those artist friends you left for lost to fill our public (and yet heavily privatized) spaces with their renditions of the newest Nikes are destroying advertising as we know it and hopefully forever.

Now how is this possible?  All you artists and analysts and admirers out there already know the answer!  What makes art avant garde?  When it identifies and seeks to destroy its own medium!  Now when all those artsy folks who have been getting sucked into advertising really start to take over the industry (like they are now), what kinds of ads will we end up with?  Well, Haddow cites “Whopper Sacrifice” as one such example: “Facebook users were rewarded a free Whopper for deleting ten friends from their account, [this] has been the most precise incidence of ‘pop nihilism’ to date.”  Get it yet?

With the economic crisis came people’s return to the only public we know to entertain us, and in our beloved internet we can slash our way through the jungle of ads with a click of our machete mouses, meaning that advertising has to step up its game to more complex campaigns if it wants us to even give them a second look.  In addition, these artists don’t want to be soul-stomped by the ancient adages that annoy and are evaded by consumers; they want to intrigue and innovate with their art and engage post-modern audiences with interactive and edgy campaigns.

With print media already under attack, and advertising (even on the cover, tsk tsk) as a last ditch effort, we are left questioning what else this wacky world that we’re creating will become.  Will journalism become a purely nonprofit effort?  Is this prediction wrong, and we’ll all continue gobbling up these intelligence-insulting images that have sold us out for our increasing credit limits?

We’re already discovering there’s no money for text-based publications; many magazines (like Vogue for example) already only print pictures of pretty bodies and products.  And content, if you still want some, is becoming a web exclusive.  If the values of the ad industry are changing (like it or not), then I sure hope all us anxious writers, political economists, and aspiring journalists are gearing up for a full-blown return to real, grassroots media that sells because it’s worth buying.  (Ironically worthwhile products and fewer ads trying to convince us to buy the crappy ones might actually make capitalism work a little better.  See Gary S. Becker’s Microeconomics and Economic Sociology.)

And while I have your minds on images, advertising, and grass, what do you think of the new roundabout?  When I think of Evergreen, which I do on a daily basis, I’d really like to think of the beautiful native plants and flowers of Western Washington, not sod.  This is just a sign of the “complexity” creeping into our consumer minds that’s leaving some people in the compacted soil.

http://pblks.com/2009/06/pop-nihilism-advertising-eats-itself/

Check out the original article at the above link or by clicking on Spongebob.  Douglas Haddow’s blog can be found at http://pblks.com/

I could go on about this most recent issue of Adbusters, including the emphasis on rebuilding economics education (replacing Neoclassical economics with behavioral and other more empirical forms of economic theory) in the universities of the world and the need for student activism in this respect.  I’ll let you pick it up yourself and support some printed word, ad-free.

Cheers to my last day of the year,

Robyn Adair
Gov Docs/Maps Assistant